On 17 July 1989, a bat-like silhouette rose from Palmdale, California, and flew to Edwards Air Force Base in silence. The Northrop B-2 Spirit, the first flying wing to enter operational service, was the culmination of a lineage that began with Jack Northrop’s XB-35 in 1946 and his YB-49 in the late 1940s. The Advanced Technology Bomber program had awarded Northrop the contract over Lockheed/Rockwell on 20 October 1981; the resulting aircraft was a 172-foot span flying wing with no fuselage, no tail, and a radar cross-section smaller than a bird. Its four General Electric F118 engines were buried deep within the wings, and its composite skin was seamless and radar-absorbent. The first public rollout, on 22 November 1988, was so secret that observers were restricted to the front view; Aviation Week editors took aerial photographs to reveal the hidden rear. The B-2 could carry 40,000 pounds of conventional or nuclear weapons across 6,000 nautical miles unrefueled, and it reached Initial Operational Capability on 1 January 1997. Only twenty-one were built, each costing roughly $2 billion. One was lost in a crash at Guam in 2008. Yet the Spirit remains the only acknowledged in-service aircraft capable of delivering large standoff weapons in a stealth configuration—a ghost in the machine age of strategic bombing.